The note she wrote to me almost a year ago, the one I’ve been using as a bookmark as I’m reading her poems, says: “Michael – thought I was out, but I found one.”
Even though it doesn’t take me long to remember what she was trying to say, I love the ambiguity of it now when I pretend to have forgotten what she meant, as if the note was not inside of a book, but just found somewhere, in a pocket, or in the bottom of a backpack.
“I thought I was out.”
It’s unlikely that Wendy thought she was out when she was actually in. But I’m intrigued. Out where? And where could she be out and still be uncertain that she was, in fact, out. She thought she was out, but it appears that that all along she was in.
“But I found one.”
What did she find? Something she did not expect to find while she was out, apparently, something that took her somewhat by surprise, and only one. A rare thing, especially when out.
I’m reading her book of poems, All About, which begins with an epigraph from The Hokey Pokey song, you know the one, the one that instructs you how to shake it. A year ago I had asked her for a signed copy and she found one for me even though she thought she was out, as in: out of books. I’m exceedingly glad she found one, first, so that I could be sitting in the backyard reading her poems on this late June afternoon, but also because I found that note she wrote, the one that I’ve been using as a bookmark, the one I pretended not to understand, so that I, too, could write a poem.
And knowing that the name of a recurring character in her poems, one Sue Generis, was a pun for the latin phrase, sui generis, I looked it up, because even though I was familiar with it, I didn’t know what it meant. Speaking of singular things, one apart from others, an original: this poem, that dumb Hokey Pokey, Sue Generis, Wendell’s lovely book All About, her note saying she thought she was out, that pair of socks she gave me once that said “Adult in Training,” of which only one sock remains. I found just the one and I’m keeping it.
michael jarmer 